St. Joseph students solve a math project as the challenging Math Olympics gets underway on March 31, 2017 at the Catholic Education Centre in Peterborough, Ont. Some Ontario students aren't showing these kids' level of success at math.Clifford Skarstedt / Postmedia

Three years after the Ontario government decided to take young students’ poor math skills seriously, provincial tests show they’re still getting worse.

If there’s good news in the latest findings from the Education Quality and Accountability Office, released Wednesday it’s that the decline has slowed. Maybe the Education Ministry’s assault on bad math is beginning to work. If so, it’s only beginning — and there’s reason to doubt that’s what’s happening.

“Our elementary-school students report that they are less confident in their math skills, but that they want to do well in math,” the agency’s chief executive, Norah Marsh, said in some pretty bland written comments along with the figures.

It’s good that they want to do well in math. It’s also appropriate that they’re not confident in their skills.

The EQAO gives annual tests on reading, writing and ‘rithmetic to students in Grades 3, 6 and 9. Reading and writing scores are decent all around: 70 to 80 per cent of junior students meet the provincial standards in those areas and the trend is either stable or gently improving. (The agency releases data a chunk at a time, getting more detailed as it goes. These are provincewide stats, with board-by-board and school-by-school results due next month.)

The reading and writing results are all markedly better now than they were a decade ago. In math, not so.

Just 62 per cent of third-graders met the provincial standard for math when they wrote their tests last year, down from 68 per cent a decade ago and one point worse than the year before. For students in Grade 6, it’s worse: Only 50 per cent of them met the standard, down from 61 per cent a decade ago. At least that number was stable from year to year.

By Grade 9, we’ve streamed students into Academic and Applied classes. Eighty-three per cent of academic-stream students met their provincial standard, versus only 44 per cent of applied-stream students meeting their less-stringent one. Those numbers have been pretty steady for years and continued to be so.

But this is in spite of a major, major push to turn things around. Under then-minister Liz Sandals, a trained mathematician and university computer-science instructor, the province started requiring a whole hour of elementary-school class time be devoted to math each day. It switched the language of math class from French to English for younger kids in French immersion. It offered more brush-up classes to elementary teachers to make them better math instructors and increased homework assistance aimed at students whose parents might not be able to help them.

We would not expect all this to work instantly. Kids who got off to a bad start with math six years ago won’t have everything sorted out for them, and Education Minister Mitzie Hunter said through a spokesman that the government’s only been going full-bore at the problem for a year.

“Going into the second year, we will continue to provide educators with professional learning and targeted supports for students, with an emphasis on students with special education needs and in applied mathematics,” Hunter said. She emphasized all the good results in reading and writing and the performance of Grade 9s in the academic stream.

But there’s a second worrying bit in the EQAO data: More students than ever are falling off the math track between Grade 3 and Grade 6.

In reading and writing, half the students in Grade 3 who didn’t meet the provincial standard improved to hit the benchmark by the time they wrote their second tests. In math, only 13 per cent improved from failers to passers last year, down from 17 per cent five years ago and 28 per cent a decade before.

As a parent, it’s easy to see how this happens.

My older son is about to start Grade 3. Neither his mom nor I have a math-heavy job so we try to speak positively about math, make a point of being seen working things out on paper, talk through the process of estimating things. Last year, we realized he had daily reading homework but never, ever, any math. His report card didn’t suggest he was a whiz but he got Bs in math skills.

It was mid-year before we realized he couldn’t reliably do basic arithmetic worksheets, when a batch of them came home to make room in a Duo-Tang that otherwise stayed at school. There’s more to math than number operations but they’re still sort of important.

We want to trust that his teachers know what’s appropriate for his age and would tell us if something were seriously amiss, but they have dozens of students to attend to — two classes’ worth, thanks to the way my son’s school is timetabled. The boy’s soon to be in his first EQAO testing year, so we’ll see how that goes.

Spotting students who are having trouble early is key and our schools are pretty good at it when the problem is words. When it’s numbers, we’re bad at it and getting worse. We’re more than twice as likely to lose a kid who’s doing OK than we are to swoop in and rescue one who’s doing badly.

Maybe it’ll just take more time. More likely, we’re not doing enough yet.

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